Early in his papacy, Pope Francis I, who has made a more modest lifestyle one of the key-stones of his tenure, said in one of his weekly addresses: “Throwing away food is like stealing from the table of those who are poor and hungry”. In Catholic Malta, more than one out of every five euros spent on food is thrown away. Twenty-two per cent of food purchased in Malta is wasted.

It is an extraordinary phenomenon of modern Maltese life that a nation which was once so frugal in its consumption has now become so wasteful. The profligate wastage of Malta’s only natural resources of limestone and water – in a country where thousands of houses stand empty and the major proportion of annual rainfall is allowed to drain away into the sea – are indicative of a national frame of mind that is also reflected in conspicuous consumption of material goods and the wanton disposal of surplus food.

Speaking during the launch of Malta’s Waste Management Plan 2014-2020, the Minister for the Environment announced that the target was to reduce food wastage from 22 per cent to 15 per cent over the space of the next five years. An “aggressive educational campaign aimed at reducing the amount of waste produced by families” was being planned to try to effect a change of attitude and behaviour.

The media campaign will include television spots to teach people how leftovers can be cooked, not simply thrown away, and the deployment of nutritionists in supermarkets who will advise customers on their consumption patterns. There are other aspects of food purchase, such as proper understanding of food labelling, which may also need public information campaigns.

However, the overriding objective of any waste management plan will be not only to reduce food wastage and lead to more sensible consumption patterns, but also to reduce the amount of waste that ends up filling Malta’s landfills. This is the crux of the problem and the underlying objective of the government’s Waste Management Plan 2014-2020.

In such a small and densely populated landmass, the identification of engineered landfill sites will always pose a huge challenge. We can look back aghast at the way Malta’s waste was disposed of before European Union directives, and financial support, forced us to abandon the likes of Magħtab, and Il-Qortin in Gozo, and to move to properly engineered landfills. But the current engineered site at Għallis is expected to reach saturation in only five years’ time.

The major cause of Malta’s landfill problems is the many thousands of tonnes of annual mining, quarrying and construction waste disposed there. Almost all waste comes from this source, overloading the landfill capacity, as well as scarring the countryside. While the government is placing its faith in the refilling of disused quarries and “incentivising re-use of limestone materials”, it remains to be seen how effective these measures will be in the long term. The government has dismissed any consideration of imposing a tax on waste deposited in landfills on the grounds – probably correct – that this will lead to even more illegal dumping in the countryside.

In the final analysis, the battle to control the amount of waste thrown away will turn on a combination of measures. Greater prudence about the way we consume our food is one way. But greater efforts at recycling waste also have a vital role to play.

Above all, reduction and control of construction and quarrying waste and its re-use and sensible disposal are crucial elements of Maltese waste management.

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